Technological improvements continue to revolutionize how people use the web to perform daily tasks. Specifically, many of these improvements deal with how we search and retrieve information. One common example of search and retrieval is the act of obtaining a list of documents most relevant to a specific task by typing in a set of keywords in a search engine. Search and retrieval is effective for many straightforward tasks (e.g., finding a movie title, finding a document, find a phone number, locating goods for purchasing, etc.). However, in many instances, users carry out information tasks that are much more complex.
Search engines are designed to assist users during the very first stage of research in which a user must locate a relevant document. Beyond the first stage, search engines have limited analysis value because they do not help users locate relevant information within a document. More complex tasks often require people to examine many different documents and threads of logic. Users must connect pieces of information collected across different threads and develop combined insights that are more valuable than lone bits of information. This process may be referred to as “connecting the dots” and is the essence of sensemaking.
Sensemaking involves making sense out of distant nuggets of information that must be identified and gathered from several different sources. Sensemaking tasks are typically longer running and more complex than information seeking tasks because they require users to address open-ended questions for which answers cannot be found on any single document. As a result, users must collect fragments of information from multiple sources and discover connections between them to build a coherent solution for a particular task. The process of “connecting the dots” is a difficult challenge in which users must mentally compare the content from a document they are viewing with the set of information they have already collected during previous stages of their task.
Currently available technologies provide only limited support for sensemaking. For example, several browser-based tools have been proposed that support the collection and organization of information (e.g., bookmarks, photos, fragments of text, etc.). Google Notebook, http://www.google.com/notebook/; N. Jhaveri et al., “The advantages of a cross-session web workspace,” in CHI '05: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pp. 1949-1952, New York, N.Y., USA, 2005, ACM Press; Clipmarks, http://www.clipmarks.com/; and M. C. Schraefel et al., “Hunter gatherer: Interaction support for the creation and management of within-web-page collections,” In Proc. of Inter. WWW Conf., 2002. These tools have proven useful for organizing and revisiting fragments of information found during a sensemaking task, however, these tools do not address the more difficult aspect of sensemaking, which is the need to “connect the dots” between the fragments of content on a newly viewed document with information previously collected by the user. This process is still manually performed in the post-search phase after a user arrives at a particular document. A user must still read through all of the potentially relevant content on a document to find any scattered fragments of information which may be relevant to their ongoing task.